Get Juveniles Out of Rikers Island

The Otis Bantum Correctional Center, Rikers Island.CreditCreditVictor J. Blue for The New York Times

New York City has developed a plan to move adolescents out of the notorious Rikers Island jail complex to a jail in the Bronx dedicated exclusively to 16- and 17-year-olds. This is an excellent and long-overdue idea that would do much to humanize the way the correctional system treats juveniles.

The idea was recommended by the Justice Department in a report compiled in 2014 by Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, documenting the barbaric treatment of young people at Rikers. The report also found a “deep-seated culture of violence” and revealed that guards often battered teenagers for minor infractions, sometimes for the sole purpose of “inflicting injuries and pain.”

Shortly after the report was released, The New Yorker magazine gave a human face to the problem in a heartbreaking article about Kalief Browder, who was accused at age 16 of stealing a backpack and held at Rikers without trial for three years — nearly two of them in solitary confinement. He never recovered from the trauma and killed himself at his family’s home last year at the age of 22. By then, the city had ended solitary confinement for Rikers prisoners under the age of 18.

The report recommended a thorough overhaul in training and operations at the city’s Department of Correction. It suggested that adolescents be removed from Rikers, which houses mainly adults, and placed in a facility where guards would be trained to manage young people with behavioral and mental health problems.

In settling a class-action suit that the Justice Department had joined, the city agreed to a broad package of reforms. The idea of a separate jail for 16- and 17-year-olds, though not required by the settlement, was part of that process.

The proposal calls for moving about 200 16- and 17-year-old inmates at Rikers to the Horizon Juvenile Center in the Bronx. The center is currently occupied by 14- and 15-year-olds, who would be moved to a facility in Brooklyn.

When fully reconfigured and refurbished, the Horizon Center would include classrooms and places for therapy sessions and other activities. Located on the mainland, instead of an island, it would also be more accessible to visiting families. The project needs approval from the City Planning Commission and the City Council, and other civic entities get to weigh in as well. But not to move forward with the plan would be a tragedy for some of the city’s most vulnerable young people.